When I was 16, I went to the Rhode Island School of Design summer program. I arrived as a pretty insufferable and opinionated know-it-all — no doubt the reason my mother was eager to let me run off to Providence for a couple of glorious months of art classes and unsupervised dorm life. One week, our design teacher gave us a tough assignment: use up an entire #2 pencil to create a single drawing. The next day, the classroom walls were lined with the results: sheets of paper grimy with...
8 days ago • 3 min read
At the west end of our garden, we have three enormous Chinese elms. They tower some thirty feet, a little cafe table and chairs tucked in their shade. A month ago, the tree on the right began to pump out fresh spring leaves. When my pugs and I strolled our street, we saw that the neighbor's elms were all getting leafy, too. But our other two elms remained skeletal, as naked as they'd been since fall began. I looked up at their bare branches and started to worry. What's going on with them? Are...
15 days ago • 4 min read
There’s a photo I saw recently of a Model T Ford parked in the middle of a dusty Kansas field. Its back wheels are jacked up off the ground, a rope looped around the axle, and trailing off toward some kind of agricultural contraption. The car isn’t driving. It’s threshing wheat. When Henry Ford designed the Model T, he probably didn’t think of it as a grain mill. But that’s what happens when a tool gets into the hands of people who don’t just want to own it—they want to use it. Twist it, hack...
22 days ago • 3 min read
Sometimes when I go to the gym, I have to really drag my ass there. I am tired, low energy, whiny, wincing at the idea of exerting myself again. But I always leave revitalized, reenergized, and glad I came. Always. It's a predictable amnesia—my body forgets yesterday's post-workout high the moment today's effort looms. My studio is the same sort of place. There are times I avoid it. Or use it to watch YouTube videos and answer emails. An office, not a workshop. But these days, I’m going...
29 days ago • 2 min read
Let me admit something that I worry is a little duplicitous. Last week, I was working on a YouTube video, and I began it by showing some examples from my sketchbooks. The examples that I selected were the ones that looked the most photorealistic. I wanted to give viewers the sense that, hey, I actually know how to draw. I feel I have to establish my own bona fides before I can give people advice about drawing. But the reality is that those examples that I have of my ability to make accurate,...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
My sister said flying was totally safe. She’d just come back from Disneyland and had no problem. “I just wiped the seat down, the armrest, nothing happened. Don’t worry about it.” Jenny was worried. Worried that we could be stranded forever and never be able to come home. That seemed way overly dramatic to me. Besides, we’d already paid a lot of money for the Airbnb. We had to go. So we went. The sunrise over JFK airport was the most insane I’d ever seen. Vermillion, peach, violet, the skies...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
One of the last theatrical experiences I had before the pandemic has stuck with me. We went to see Gatz, a wonderful staging of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The play isn’t based on the novel. It is the novel. All 49,000 words of it, read aloud, over eight hours (including a few intermissions). All they left out were the chapter titles. Gatz was a profound experience and I’ve thought about it a lot, about what I felt as I sat in my narrow theatre seat for the better part of a Friday. The...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
The roast chicken is in the oven, potatoes, and some steamed spinach. I just poured us two glasses of chardonnay. I call out, “How much time till we eat?” Jenny replies, “Twenty-five minutes.” Now what? I have some energy, but not a lot. I don’t want to exert myself anymore today. It’s Me Time, a little snack-sized serving to do something for myself. How often life serves up these little gaps in the day, time I might waste by scrolling on my phone. These are some of the things I did...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
When I was about fifteen, I developed an obsession with the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It is a wonderful place that wraps around the back of the granite walls of the Brooklyn Museum. I would take the #2 train of a Sunday and stroll its grounds in a sort of fugue. I wouldn’t see the old ladies with their walkers or the bearded hippies studying the vegetable garden or the Bangladeshi families in their Sunday best taking family photos with their Instamatics. They didn’t exist because I was...
2 months ago • 7 min read